Bitwise Operation - Bit Shifts

The bit shifts are sometimes considered bitwise operations, because they operate on the binary representation of an integer instead of its numerical value; however, the bit shifts do not operate on pairs of corresponding bits, and therefore cannot properly be called bit-wise. In these operations the digits are moved, or shifted, to the left or right. Registers in a computer processor have a fixed width, so some bits will be "shifted out" of the register at one end, while the same number of bits are "shifted in" from the other end; the differences between bit shift operators lie in how they determine the values of the shifted-in bits.